We Have The Wisdom: Why Are The Systems Missing? : Turning knowledge into infrastructure across African philanthropy

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Following my first piece published on 4 June 2026, Beyond Storytelling: Why African philanthropy needs more than narratives, the reflections and questions it sparked have continued to generate rich conversations across the philanthropy ecosystem. These discussions have taken different forms, including an invitation from the team at the African Youth Philanthropy Network (AYPN) to serve as a provocateur for the final session of their series, The Next Architecture of Philanthropy.

These conversations have left me with a question that feels increasingly urgent: What do we do with African wisdom?

For years, we have rightly celebrated and documented Africa’s rich traditions of giving, solidarity, mutual aid, and community-led resilience. But documenting this wisdom is not enough. How do we move it from story to practice, from narrative to influence? How can African traditions and ways of organizing inform the systems, policies, institutions, and practices that shape philanthropy on the continent? And, ultimately, how can they influence not only how capital is mobilized but also how power is held and distributed?

As the African proverb reminds us, “If you want to go fast, go alone, and if you want to go far, go together.” The conversations emerging across the ecosystem suggest that this work cannot be done in isolation. It requires us to share, challenge, and collectively reimagine what the future of African philanthropy can look like.

Mahomed and Mwendwa among others across the continent, have shown through their deep dives into African giving traditions that the work of documenting and elevating these narratives is growing but spotlighting these traditions alone is not enough to unlock their full systemic potential. To ground the questions above, I draw on reflections from experts and practitioners across the region, whose insights both challenge and expand this conversation. Through a series of interviews, they share practical perspectives on how indigenous knowledge and lived experience can inform real systems change, moving from values to mechanisms, from stories to strategy, and from intention to implementation.

From practice to proof

Perhaps the first thing to re-emphasize is that African philanthropy did not begin with the formal sector. Savings groups, faith-based giving, mutual-aid associations, burial societies, diaspora networks and extended-family systems have long pooled resources, shared risk, and responded to need through practical systems built on relationships rather than wealth. Much of this giving remains invisible to formal philanthropic architecture, and what is not counted is easily treated as though it does not exist. As one contribution puts it, "What we choose to measure often shapes what we choose to value." The task is not simply to celebrate this informal giving but to understand how much is mobilised, where it flows, and who decides, turning invisible practice into useful evidence without stripping it of its social meaning.

Telling these stories matters, it can help reshape how Africa is seen and heard and also give language to values that have sustained communities for generations. But storytelling becomes limiting when documentation and celebration become the destination rather than the beginning. As Eddah Jowah, coordinator at SIVIO Institute, a philanthropy support organization in Zimbabwe, notes, “Storytelling can distract from action, and though it's not a piece we can ignore, it should ultimately lead to mobilization." A story should have somewhere to go, and so the real question is not storytelling versus systems, but what we ask storytelling to do.

The conversation around African giving can easily slip into nostalgia, dwelling on who we were and what has been lost, but Eddah offers a correction: "Sometimes we spend so much time talking about who we are, who we were, and not enough time talking about who we could become." Identity here is not just cultural memory but a source of agency and ambition, recalling a time when pride in what made people powerful drove them to fight and build. Storytelling, then, should not only recover the past but also help design a future, turning memory into imagination, and imagination into action.

Making the story real

If storytelling is memory, education is transmission. To shape the future, storytelling ought to leverage the channels people actually engage with, the institutions that shape decisions on transformative practices, and the programs philanthropy chooses to fund.

Mercy Murigi, senior program manager at Africa Management Institute makes a strong case: “If narratives are to travel across generations, the arts need to be treated as part of the infrastructure of cultural and philanthropic change, alongside education. This is ultimately a systems question. If we want the wisdom embedded in African traditions to influence future generations, it cannot depend solely on annual conferences, essays, or occasional campaigns. It has to find a place in the institutions through which societies reproduce knowledge and values.” Education therefore becomes one of the longest-term investments in philanthropic systems change. The question is not only what young people know about Africa's past, but also whether they leave formal education with a stronger understanding of who they are, what they are capable of, and the kind of society they might help build.

That same intentionality has to extend to program design. If philanthropy celebrates African knowledge and locally rooted approaches, those values should be visible in what it chooses to finance, drawing deliberately on local production, culture, enterprise, and knowledge rather than defaulting to familiar designs. As Mercy Murigi states it, "How we design programs also has to be intentional. We have to put our money where our mouth is." Celebrating community ownership while failing to fund community institutions, or celebrating indigenous knowledge while not letting it shape program design, leaves a disconnect between the story philanthropy tells and the system it actually builds.

Building the infrastructure to match the culture

If values must show up in program design, they must also show up in the systems that carry giving forward. Traditional and modern philanthropy need not compete. For example, a local savings club could connect with a community foundation that pools resources from residents, diaspora and local businesses for both immediate relief and longer-term investment. The task, as Eddah puts it, “is to connect the strengths of traditional practices to contemporary institutions and capital without stripping away the agency and trust that make them work." Yet this connective infrastructure is exactly what is missing: "Our culture of giving is stronger than our infrastructure for giving." Infrastructure here means more than technology; it is the institutions, policies, intermediaries, and legal frameworks that let resources be aggregated, tracked, and sustained without replacing the relationships that already make giving work.

Nicholas Mwakuona, Programme Coordinator of East Africa Philanthropy Network (EAPN) indicates that “EAPN’s emerging 5P framework; People, Philanthropy, Public Institutions, Private Capital and Partnerships offers a simple lens for understanding how ecosystem actors connect to turn resources into systemic impact. Its value lies not simply in the presence of these actors, but in how effectively their relationships function. For example, community-defined needs are identified and verified, philanthropic capital absorbs early risk, public institutions address enabling constraints, private capital supports scale, and partnerships provide the governance, coordination and learning needed to sustain impact. Technology can lower the costs of trust and coordination, but it is not the system itself. The real task is making the path from community priority to capital, governance, and learning visible and credible.”

That system must also convert momentary generosity into lasting capacity. Community philanthropy responds powerfully to crisis, but crisis-driven giving, as we have noted over time, does not automatically build institutions or resilience and so raises the question of how today's donations become tomorrow's endowments, and how relief becomes resilience. Formal philanthropy can add its greatest value here, not by displacing community practice but by building mechanisms that let moments of generosity mature into durable assets and relationships.

Underneath all of this is a question of power. Nicholas emphasizes that, “Who owns the institutions, controls the capital, defines evidence, and retains the value created. The honest test is whether this infrastructure changes who can originate opportunities and govern deployment or whether we have simply changed the language of ownership without changing its architecture.

One Parting thought

My first reflection ended with the image of the lion learning to write, read, think, and act on its own thoughts. Perhaps this conversation takes that metaphor one step further. The lion has learned to tell its story. It has recovered some of its memory. It has begun to interrogate its identity. But what will it build?

The responses to this conversation suggest that the challenge before African philanthropy is not that we lack wisdom. We have deep traditions of reciprocity, solidarity, mutual responsibility, and resource mobilization. Nor is the answer to abandon storytelling. The challenge is to make the stories consequential; to connect identity to education, culture to program design, community practice to institutions, institutions to capital, and capital to systems that redistribute agency and value.

“Perhaps the next chapter of African philanthropy is not about discovering whether we have the wisdom. We know we do. It is about deciding what deserves to be built from it and having the courage to build it.” - Eddah Jowah